Letters 6-19-08

Thursday

Jun 19, 2008 at 6:23 AMJun 19, 2008 at 6:25 AM

Victorville should reject land swap with CEMEX

I urge the City of Victorville to withdraw its resolution in support of HR (House Resolution) 5887 and for citizens to write Congressman Buck McKeon and Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein to withdraw their support for HR 5887, a land swap deal.

The CEMEX mine is the center of HR 5887, which was only a 400-acre facility in the Santa Clarita area chased out due to environmental problems — water and air pollution concerns.

So what does HR 5887 do? It gives CEMEX upwards of 5,000 acres of land. Why is it OK that we get a project that pollutes the air and water — and even more to the point, why is the Victorville City Council saying that increasing the risk of serious health problems for us is OK?

The people in the Barstow and Mojave Valley area stand a four times greater chance of contracting lung cancer from the diesel emissions from trains in the area, we still are still suffering from chromium problems from the PG&E facility (despite claims of remediation efforts underway), nitrate problems in our water, chromium in the air from concrete aggregate crushers in the Oro Grande to Helendale area, VOCs and PM-10s above the levels allowed by the EPA throughout the Mojave Valley, and now you want to add a polluting mining operation that will add to the toxic and noxious air quality?

How could the city cut such a hell-bent deal with McKeon and CEMEX? For the wealthy's pleasure in Santa Clarita, the people in the High Desert should be burdened? I don't think so.

This is a bill that hides a legacy of poor decisions in the late 1980s and 1990s for sure (when McKeon was on the City Council in Santa Clarita and he thought it was a good idea), but don't let him make another bad mistake at our expense.

Being unlearned in the art of Economics and not trusted to do any serious grocery shopping, what is said here has to be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.

Each time I look into my empty wallet I see a nation whose value of consumption is greater than its value of production. Until consumption and production are brought into balance, my country and I will have difficulty making our way in the world.

Robert WilkinsApple Valley

President must approve Congress' spending requests

Re: Carter in charge during one of worst recessions (Letters, June 6).

Darrel Hagen says that Jimmy Carter brought about the Iranian hostage crisis by "undermining the Shah of Iran." The Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was a vicious dictator in the same mold as Saddam Hussein, who was reinstated as leader of Iraq in a 1953 coup backed by the U.S. and Britain which deposed the popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh because he nationalized the oil companies. Decades of brutality under the Shah is what lead to the Iranian revolution. Our hostages were taken because Carter reluctantly allowed the Shah to come to the U.S. for medical treatment instead of turning him over to Iran for trial.

Hagen says that our hostages were released "because of the so-called Iran-Contra scandal, a minor price to pay in order to get our people back." But the Iran-Contra scandal had nothing to do with the release of our hostages, which happened years earlier. The Iran-Contra scandal was about members of the Reagan Administration engaging in illegal weapons sales to our terrorist enemies in Iran at a time when we were supporting Saddam Hussein in the Iran/Iraq war. The profits from these sales were then used to finance the continuation of the Reagan Administration's illegal war against the government of Nicaragua, also the result of a popular revolt against a U.S. backed dictator, which had been ordered stopped by Congress. This blatant violation of our laws and our Constitution was hardly minor.

Major economic recessions occurred under both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, but only one of them left us trillions of dollars in debt.

And the fact of the matter is that Congressional spending requests must be approved by the President, who can veto spending bills he doesn't like.